Localisation Without Abandonment

The humanitarian sector is being forced to make difficult choices. Funding has fallen sharply, programmes are being reduced, international positions are disappearing and organisations are searching for less costly ways to remain operational. At the same time, the commitment to locally led humanitarian action is rightly becoming stronger.

These two developments are increasingly presented as if they naturally belong together: international structures become smaller, while local organisations and national staff assume more responsibility.

The timing of these reductions could not be worse. While humanitarian budgets and specialist security capacity are shrinking, recorded violence against aid workers is rising dramatically. The latest figures from the Aid Worker Security Database show that 907 humanitarian personnel were killed, wounded or kidnapped in 2025, compared with 833 in 2024, an increase of almost nine per cent. Although the number killed fell from the record 387 deaths registered in 2024 to 350 in 2025, the overall number of people affected by major attacks reached a new high.

These totals need to be interpreted carefully. Reporting has improved considerably since the database began in 1997, and the humanitarian workforce has also grown. Raw figures alone cannot tell us the precise likelihood that any individual worker will be harmed. Even with those caveats, however, the post-2023 increase is too large to dismiss as a reporting effect.

In short, humanitarian organisations are reducing some of the systems intended to manage security risk at a time when the recorded threat is demonstrably intensifying, all whilst moving towards localisation.

There is real potential in that shift. Local colleagues usually possess deeper contextual knowledge, stronger community relationships and a longer-term stake in the places where humanitarian organisations work. Localisation is both necessary and overdue.

But localisation driven by principle is not the same as localisation driven by budget cuts.

If responsibility moves faster than authority, resources and protection, the result is not meaningful localisation. It is risk transfer.

The people carrying the risk

The burden is not shared equally. National personnel make up most of the humanitarian workforce and the overwhelming majority of those harmed. IFRC reported in May 2026 that 99 per cent of the humanitarians killed in violent incidents during 2025 were local personnel. It also called for greater investment in training, protective equipment, insurance and support for local staff, volunteers and their families.

This disparity cannot be explained only by workforce composition. National colleagues are more likely to remain close to operations during deteriorating conditions, while international personnel are often relocated or evacuated. Local staff also continue living in the context long after an international deployment has ended. They may face threats connected to their identity, community relationships, perceived political affiliation or association with an international organisation, risks that do not end when the working day or project does.

Shir Shah Ayobi made the point very clear in response to a post I wrote a few months ago:

“As a national staff member early in my career, I was given responsibilities often assigned to expatriates. I took Red Cross principles, ethics, and accountability seriously, and at times paid a personal price for refusing misuse of humanitarian resources, including detention.

“For localization to succeed, we must transfer not only responsibility, but also protection, institutional backing, and the space to make difficult decisions. Otherwise, we risk transferring accountability and risk without transferring real power.”

— Shir Shah Ayobi, responding to “Humanitarian Security Cuts Threaten Aid Worker Safety”

His reference to detention is particularly important. The consequences faced by national colleagues are not limited to greater exposure to operational incidents. They may include retaliation, criminalisation and arbitrary detention.

Yemen provides a particularly stark example. Dozens of UN national staff have been arbitrarily detained by the Houthi authorities, some for more than two years. In November 2025, 17 humanitarian-affiliated personnel—all national staff, including three UN employees—were sentenced to death on espionage charges. As Sarah Whittaker, Olivier Vandecasteele and Charles Petrie recently asked in The New Humanitarian, would the institutional response have been different if those detained had been international personnel?

Arbitrary detention is not simply another external threat to record in a risk assessment. It is also a test of whether humanitarian institutions will visibly and persistently stand behind the national colleagues who accept responsibilities, and consequences, in their name.

Recent research points in the same direction. GISF notes that local and national NGOs continue to have much weaker access to dedicated security budgets, insurance and protective resources than their international counterparts. ODI has similarly argued that the overheads routinely underfunded for local organisations are precisely what pay for staff retention, duty of care, safety and security, compliance and organisational resilience.

This matters enormously when international security posts are among the positions being cut.

A security adviser does much more than give travel advice or update a risk register. The role should help leadership understand exposure, ensure that concerns reach decision-makers, challenge unsafe assumptions, coordinate incident response, maintain minimum standards and convert field information into organisational decisions. Removing the post does not remove those functions. It merely redistributes them—often without saying to whom.

They may fall to a country director with an already impossible workload, an HR colleague without specialist experience, or a national security focal point who has been given responsibility but little authority, training or institutional backing. In partner-led operations, they may simply pass to the local organisation expected to deliver the programme.

The danger is that everyone assumes someone else still owns the risk.

Silence does not mean safety

There is another problem that deserves much more attention: local staff may have less freedom to say that an activity is unsafe.

Humanitarian security systems depend on honest reporting. Leaders cannot take sound decisions if they do not know about threats, near misses, unsafe behaviour or growing community hostility. Yet reporting is not simply a technical process. It is shaped by power.

A colleague whose salary supports an extended family, and who knows that projects and positions are disappearing, may think carefully before recommending that an activity be suspended. A local security focal point may understand the threat perfectly well but fear being seen as obstructive, overly cautious or incapable of finding solutions. A partner organisation competing for its next grant may hesitate to tell an international donor that a programme cannot be delivered safely within the proposed budget or timetable.

In such circumstances, what organisations describe as “acceptable risk” may be deeply misleading. It does not necessarily represent informed and voluntary consent. It may instead be constrained choice: continuing to work because the financial, professional or personal consequences of refusing are simply too high.

In those circumstances, “no incidents reported” may reflect confidence in the system. It may also reflect a lack of confidence that reporting will be welcomed, or that the person raising the concern will be protected.

This is not a criticism of local staff or local organisations. It is a reason to examine the conditions under which they are being asked to assume risk. As I argued in an earlier LinkedIn post, the ability to refuse unsafe work is not equally distributed.

Transferring responsibility without giving people the power and institutional backing to make difficult decisions does not empower them. It can expose them.

Training is essential—but it is not a transfer of liability

Organisations facing severe financial constraints cannot always retain the security structures they previously had. A realistic response must therefore include much greater investment in the people who will carry security responsibilities locally.

That means more than a short online course and the addition of “security focal point” to somebody’s job description. Useful capacity development should be based on the organisation’s actual operating environment and should include:

• practical risk assessment and context analysis;
• incident and near-miss reporting;
• contingency and crisis-management planning;
• staff briefings and training delivery;
• communicating risk effectively and influencing decision-makers at country, regional and headquarters levels, including presenting a clear, evidence-based case for proportionate security measures across cultural, linguistic and organisational boundaries;
• access, acceptance and stakeholder engagement;
• the authority to pause or challenge unsafe activity; and
• continuing mentoring, exercises and professional development.

Training should perhaps also reach local service providers, not only staff inside international organisations. Locally based trainers, risk advisers and security providers can offer contextual knowledge, language skills, availability and continuity that intermittent international deployments cannot. Developing that capacity is a practical investment in localisation.

But training alone cannot discharge an organisation’s duty of care. A capable focal point still needs a clear mandate, access to senior management, a protected reporting line and a budget. Local providers need appropriate procurement, safeguarding, quality assurance and professional standards. Most importantly, senior leadership must remain accountable for the decisions taken on the basis of their advice.

Organisations can also draw on collective security mechanisms. Non-profit organisations such as the International NGO Safety Organisation (INSO) provide incident reporting, alerts, contextual analysis, coordination, training and crisis-management support across the humanitarian community. INSO currently supports more than 1,300 local and international NGOs, allowing organisations to share information and access specialist capacity that many could not sustain independently.

Yet these collective services are themselves under pressure. USAID previously provided approximately 37 per cent of INSO’s global budget. Following the suspension of that funding, INSO maintained its core country services but suspended most of its in-person security training, including HEIST and HEFAT courses, and announced the closure of 19 sub-offices. INSO itself warned that this would have a particular impact on national NGO partners that had relied upon free training to develop their security capacity.

Shared security platforms should therefore form part of a more sustainable model, but organisations cannot simply assume that collective services will fill the gaps left by internal cuts. Those services also require predictable funding and long-term investment.

And it should always be remembered that whilst expertise can be brought in from outside, accountability cannot be outsourced.

A proportionate hybrid model

For many organisations, the answer will not be to recreate the large security structures of the past. Nor should the only alternatives be a full-time international adviser or no specialist support at all.

A proportionate model could combine four elements:

1. A named internal risk owner. A senior manager must retain clear responsibility for ensuring that security risks are understood, resourced and acted upon.

2. Trained local focal points and providers. Those closest to operations need relevant skills, explicit authority, time to perform the function and safe routes for raising concerns.

3. Shared or regional expertise. Several country programmes or partner organisations may be able to sustain specialist support collectively where none could justify a full-time post alone. Some organisations have pooled resources to hire a shared security specialist across a geographical area of operations, with mixed results.

4. Targeted external support. Independent specialists can conduct assessments, review systems, mentor focal points, facilitate exercises, investigate gaps and provide surge capacity during a crisis or organisational transition.

Consultancies such as International Location Safety already offer professional training and mentoring for security focal points. Independent advisers can complement such provision by helping organisations design governance arrangements, test whether systems work in practice and give senior leaders an external challenge function. Used selectively, this is not a substitute for internal ownership. It is a way of maintaining access to expertise when permanent specialist capacity is no longer affordable.

The precise arrangement will vary. A small national organisation, a federation of local partners and a large international agency do not need identical systems. The test should be whether the model is clear, credible and usable: who receives warnings, who can stop an activity, who supports the person making that decision, and who remains answerable if known risks are ignored?

Localisation must include protection

The humanitarian sector cannot respond to financial pressure by preserving programme expectations while quietly removing the systems that make those programmes safe. Nor should locally led action become a convenient label for placing greater exposure on people with fewer resources and less freedom to refuse it.

Genuine localisation means transferring power as well as tasks. In security terms, that requires funding, information, decision-making authority, competent advice, organisational backing and protection for those who speak up.

The current crisis may require leaner systems and new ways of accessing expertise. It does not remove the need for governance. If anything, smaller structures make clarity of accountability more important.

When a security post disappears, responsibility does not disappear with it. Managers must decide deliberately where that responsibility now sits, ensure that the people carrying it are properly supported, and remain prepared to hear, and act on, the answer when somebody says the work is not safe.

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